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As Mercury Rose, So Did Smell of Trash

Just after a long three-day holiday weekend, in the middle of a scorching triple-digit afternoon on Tuesday, on a patch of sidewalk in Chinatown outside the seemingly wise Confucius Plaza at Bowery and Bayard Street, a pile of trash simmered in the New York sun.

As mounds of refuse go, this one was neither unusually tall nor unusually messy. At about five bags, it rose about two feet off the ground.

There were neatly tied bags of paper and cardboard recycling. Mysterious foodstuffs of unknown vintage spilled out onto the sidewalk.

A banana peel. A shriveled-up chunk of what may have once been a watermelon. McDonald’s hamburger containers. Cigarette butts. A can of paint. Milk cartons.

On any other day, Mayumi Hosoi, who waited for a bus a few steps away, might not have even noticed the pile. But by midafternoon, the temperature had reached 103 in Central Park, and the heat that cooked people’s nerves and the city’s subway platforms roasted this mound of trash, and hundreds like it around New York City.

People are always saying it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity. On Tuesday on some of the searing streets of the city, it was neither the heat nor the humidity, but the putridity. Because the men and women who pick up garbage had the day off on Monday for the Fourth of July, the piles of trash grew in size and in scent in parts of the city.

For the Department of Sanitation, Tuesday was one of the agency’s busiest days of the year. It was a mandatory workday for all sanitation workers. About 240 workers who had been on vacation but who had volunteered to be placed on an emergency call-up list were called in.

To pick up as much of Monday’s trash as possible, the agency had 500 more trucks collecting residential garbage than would be normal on a Tuesday, said Peter McKeon, the Sanitation Department’s chief of collection.

Photo

As the temperatures kept rising on Tuesday, so did the smell of the garbage, like this pile in Crotona Park North in the Bronx. Credit
Michael Appleton for The New York Times

“We don’t have enough trucks and personnel to do everything at once,” Mr. McKeon said. “It takes some time. We do have a large amount of extra trucks today. We’ll put out extra trucks tomorrow also. We’ll be working around the clock until we catch up.”

In the heat, the trash that the department and the commercial haulers had not yet collected proved both an olfactory and linguistic problem for New Yorkers. People tried to explain just how awful it was when a piece of chicken sat in a plastic bag on a sidewalk in 103-degree weather.

Lorna Bumbury, who waited for a bus in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, swiped at the tip of her nose. She was at a loss to explain why the nine empty trash bins she stood next to still emitted a repulsive odor. She figured it had something to do with the mysterious liquid dripping from them.

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“It smells like cat or dog feces mixed with food that been there for weeks or something,” Ms. Bumbury said.

At the edge of Crotona Park in the Bronx, David Morales, 53, parked next to an urban mini-mountain of some 20 black bags, the highest peaks three bags high. His car door was inches from it. His wife, Melly, carefully walked one of their three daughters, Isabelle, 7, down the hill and away from the trash.

Mr. Morales had taken Isabelle to play in Crotona Park in hopes of finding some fresh air and escaping the accumulated mounds near their apartment, at White Plains Road and East Tremont Avenue. “Last night it was smelling something rotten,” Mr. Morales said. “My kids were crying, ‘What’s that smell, Daddy? It smells like a rat that’s dead.’ I said, ‘No, mami, it’s not a rat, it’s the garbage.’ ”

Like everything else in New York, the problem was relative. On many streets, the trash was neatly contained in wastebaskets, with no spillage, or it had been quickly dispatched by the city, a commercial hauler or a local business improvement district. There were mostly clean, odor-free sidewalks along parts of the Grand Concourse in the Bronx and Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights on Tuesday morning. Even the air at the dog runs at DeWitt Clinton Park in Manhattan was, well, not unpleasant.

Some people ignored the trash and the smell. Others even stuck their heads and hands right in.

In Brooklyn, a toothless 75-year-old woman pushed an old cart down Columbia Street, about a block from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. She had bags and bags of aluminum cans. She was asked how much she thought she earned. “Why?” she replied. “Do you want to turn me into the Internal Revenue?”

It was 91 degrees in Central Park at that hour of morning. The smell of the interior of Columbia Street wastebaskets did not bother her. “It’s not trash,” she explained. “It’s money.”

By 6 p.m., the pile on Bowery in Chinatown remained. Flies circled and landed. The sun had taken pity on the noses of those at the bus stop. It was cooler now. It was 98.

A version of this article appears in print on July 7, 2010, on Page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: Post-Holiday Trash Piles, Roasting in Ovenlike Weather. Yes, It Was Bad. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe